Stories from the field
Emergency vaccination campaign starts in Port au Prince
February 9, 2010
This strip of tarmac—known as “La Piste”—used to be a runway at the Port-au-Prince airport. Now, it’s home to an estimated 30,000 people displaced by the earthquake. And on February 5, it was the first stop for a massive effort to vaccinate 140,000 survivors against measles, diptheria and tetanus.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is the main implementing partner on the project, and with help from more than 100 volunteers—mostly from the Haitian Red Cross—it expects to reach 80 per cent of the people to be vaccinated. At La Piste, the IFRC team gave needles to more than 1,800 people, along with vitamin A and a deworming treatment.
For now, the two-week-long campaign, initiated by the Haitian Ministry of Health, UNICEF and the Pan American Health Organization, will focus on the hundreds of camps like La Piste that have sprung up around Port-au-Prince. That’s because the threat of disease outbreaks is highest in the capital. “People are living in extremely harsh conditions that directly threaten their health and well-being,” says Dr. Richard Munz, the IFRC’s Health Coordinator in Haiti. “It’s an important opportunity to reach those who are most at risk.”
To help get the word out, the Haitian Red Cross and the IFRC have joined forces with a local telephone company, Voila/Comsel, to send daily text messages to 1.2 million Haitians about health-prevention issues, including the vaccination campaign.
The IFRC expects to vaccinate an average of 1,300 men, women and children each day through its emergency medical facilities, which have a collective capacity to treat 340,000 people. So far, more than 12,000 have been vaccinated. “Though the crowded conditions are slowly improving, the situation remains dire,” says Dr. Munz. “It’s going to be a long journey to recovery. Preventing further health deterioration is a fundamental step in this moment of the emergency.”
